MISSOURI RIVER

The Missouri River has been and will continue to be one of the principle assets of the State of Missouri. The river provides drinking water for communities, cooling water for power plants, and a low-cost highway for goods and agricultural products. At the same time, the Missouri River can at times be a dangerous river, delivering floods that threaten homes, communities and farms.

Federal laws protect the flow of the Missouri River. The United States Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies are given the responsibility to manage the river as it flows among the states, to assure that navigation is protected, that floods are limited and that all downstream uses and environmental needs are met.

The Attorney General's Office fights in court to protect Missouri's rights in the Missouri River. When Missouri’s interests are threatened, the Attorney General takes on the federal government and other states to assure that the Missouri River continues to flow, as it has for millennia.

In recent years, the Attorney General has successfully challenged the federal government’s diversion of water out the Missouri River basin. The federal government would have taken that water and transferred it to waterways that drain to the Hudson Bay and not back to the Missouri River. These types of diversions threaten the flow of the river and its environment and could leave the state without the water resources it needs to support its economy and its people.

The Attorney General has also opposed the “spring rise.” For years, the Army Corps of Engineers created an artificial increase in water levels in the river even though this increase threatened the state with floods. Thanks to the efforts of the Attorney General, other state officials, local activists and farmers, the Corps has stopped that dangerous practice.